I'm new to Gentoo. I've just installed 3 different machines with it - two PCs and one Sun Blade 100. I'd really like to see several things add to the installation manual that would really make the life of some people easier. All this info is found here in the forum, or discovered by me.

1) The boot from the live CD on Sun with PGX-24 and LCD panel leads to the unsupported video mode. The solution is to append a kernel parameter:

boot: gentoo video=atyfb:1024x768@60

Same parameter should be added in lilo or grub config files.

2) Kernel build with the command:

make vmlux

in most cases produces "vmlinux" much bigger than allowed 3.6M size.
The (working) soultion is to strip it after make:

make vmlinux
strip vmlinux

It could be added into makefile, of course.

3) Sun Blade 100 has on-board sound card. I doubt there is a large variety of this cards in thes machines, so simply knowing the driver name and how to load them properly would really help.

Currently, I'm loading (in /etc/XF86Config ) the following modules:

trident
ac97_codec
soundcore

but I'm not sure if this is correct.

4) Some of the packages masked out for sparc are working fine. I didn't find how I can (or may be I shouldn't) report these packages to include "sparc" or "~sparc" into the KEYWORDS. A line in the Desktop Configuration Guide would be sufficient.
Here are some of these packages:

There are several sparc packages that work fine, but are still masked. Reason is generally due to lack of testing. If you give'em a run and everything is peachy, fill out a report at bug.gentoo.org. Let the sparc team know things are good and they will unmask them.